Sponsored by the Green Family Foundation. After more than two centuries of political strife, successive coups d’état, authoritarian governments, international interventions, and natural disasters, President Duvalier’s pronouncement that “It is the destiny of the people of Haiti to suffer,” seems valid. Moderator Hector Duarte Jr. and Haitian authors M.J. Fievre, Fabienne Josaphat, and Katia D. Ulysse will discuss Haiti’s recent history, viewed through the prism of literature — from the days of Papa Doc Duvalier,…

Since the days of Alex Haley’s transformative series Roots, there has been an intense interest among African-American and African-Caribbean peoples in their genealogies and family histories. Photographer and visual documentarian Marvin Elliott Ellis, author and genealogist Melvin Collier, and historian and preservationist Sonia Jacobs Dow will discuss and share successful techniques and strategies to trace your genealogy and family history.…

Sponsored by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Get the view from the front lines of literary publishing, as John Gosslee of Fjords Review and C&R Press, P. Scott Cunningham of Jai-Alai Books, Ralph Hamilton of Rhino, and Miguel Pichardo of Gulf Stream discuss what editors look for in submitted work, the shifting literary landscape, what it takes to run a magazine or press, and answer your questions about writing and the literary market.…

Experts from the fields of history and ethnic studies consider the economies, cultural identities, and political struggles that have bridged and divided the experiences of Caribbean people. Join Ada Ferrer (Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution); Alaí Reyes-Santos (Our Caribbean Kin: Race and Nation in the Neoliberal Antilles); Matthew J. Smith (Liberty, Fraternity, Exile: Haiti and Jamaica After Emancipation); and moderator Chantalle F. Verna, Associate Professor of History and International Relations at Florida International University,…

Join five poets published by A Midsummer Night’s Press, the preeminent publisher of LGBT poetry in the United States — Julie R. Enszer (Sisterhood), Rigoberto González (Our Lady of the Crossword), Raymond Luczak (Mute), Achy Obejas (This is What Happened in Our Other Life), moderated by two-time Lambda Literary Award-winner Lawrence Schimel, — as they explore how intersecting identities of race, religion, sexuality, class and/or disability shapes their writing and their poetics.…

For many North Americans, Cuba and Haiti grab the headlines, while the rest of the Caribbean is just a tropical dream come true. This panel will prove that there’s a lot more to the Caribbean. Fiction writer Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw of Trinidad and Tobago and Sharon Leach of Jamaica explore the wry, self-conscious sides of the urban Caribbean, while debut poet Vladimir Lucien of St. Lucia, winner of the coveted 2015 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature,…

Despite the dire predictions that public libraries would not survive the turn of the millennium, their numbers have only increased. Now, two out of three Americans frequent a public library at least once a year and nearly that many are registered borrowers. Although library authorities have argued that the public library functions primarily as a civic institution necessary for maintaining democracy, in Part of Our Lives:  A People’s History of the American Public Library, author Wayne A. Wiegand shows that generations of library patrons tell a different story.…

Harvey Frommer tells the fascinating story of the ground-breaking AFL-NFL World Championship Football game played on January 15, 1967, in When It Was Just a Game: Remembering the First Super Bowl. Just in time for the one-hundredth anniversary of Miami Beach, It Happened in Miami, the Magic City: An Oral History by Myrna Katz Frommer and Harvey Frommer, features nearly seventy mini-memoirs, ranging from World War II to today.…

From beloved New Yorker cartoonist Bob Eckstein, Footnotes from the World’s Greatest Bookstores invites you into the heart and soul of every community: the local bookshop, each with its own quirks, charms, and legendary stories. Joining him in this “indie bookstore love fest” are authors  Jennifer Haigh (Heat and Light) and Amy Stewart (Lady Cop Makes Trouble). Moderated by the American Booksellers Association’s Oren Teicher. Association’s Oren Teicher.…

In Lucas Mann’s Lord Fear: A Memoir, the author tries to reconstruct a portrait of his brother who died from a heroin overdose, and comes to redefine his own place in a family whose narrative is bisected by the tragic loss. In Ed Tarkington’s debut novel, Only Love Can Break Your Heart, an affair between a teenager and the daughter of a wealthy neighbor sets in motion a course of events that causes catastrophe for both their families. …

In Caroline Leavitt’s Cruel Beautiful World, it’s 1969, and sixteen-year-old Lucy is about to run away to live off the grid in rural Pennsylvania, a rash act that will have vicious repercussions for both her and her older sister, Charlotte. In A Place We Knew Well, Susan Carol McCarthy captures the shock and innocence, anxiety, and fear brought on by the Cuban Missile Crisis, and brings vividly to life one ordinary family trying to hold center while the world around them falls apart.…

The Lost Civilization of Suolucidir, by Susan Daitch, is a satiric, post-colonial adventure story about the search for a mythical lost city located somewhere in modern-day Iran. In a world beset by amassing forces of darkness, one organization—the Regional Office—and its coterie of super-powered female assassins protects the globe from annihilation, in Manuel Gonzales‘s The Regional Office is Under Attack! Planet for Rent by Cuban science fiction writer Yoss, is a raucous tale of a future in which a failing Earth is at the mercy of powerful capitalist alien colonizers.…

Coordinated by the Florida State University Libraries, the Florida Book Awards were established in 2006 to celebrate the best Florida literature. Join winners Arva Moore Parks (2015, Silver, Florida Non-Fiction, George Merrick: Son of the South Wind), Patrick Kendrick (2015, Silver, Young Adult, The Savants), Andres Pi Andreu (2015, Gold, Spanish Language, 274) and David Kirby (2013, Silver, Poetry The Biscuit Joint). Moderated by Christine Koontz, Executive Director of the Florida Book Awards.…

In Nicole Dennis-Benn‘s debut l, Here Comes the Sun, a cast of unforgettable women battle for independence while a maelstrom of change threatens their Jamaican community. Ali Eteraz‘s debut novel, Native Believer, depicts a second-generation immigrant whose life spins out of control in the pulsating underbelly of Philadelphia. A family hired by a research institute to teach sign language to an abandoned chimp must come to terms with the institute’s questionable studies, in Kaitlyn Greenidge‘s We Love You,…

Montague Kobbé‘s novel, On the Way Back, is a hilarious story centered around a failed business venture on the island of Anguilla. Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan’s Sarong Party Girls: A Novel is about a young woman’s rise in the glitzy, moneyed city of Singapore, where old traditions clash with heady modern materialism. Set in post-Franco Spain, Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes‘s novel, The Sleeping World, a disillusioned university student searches for her missing brother.…

Rory Flynn‘s Dark Horse: An Eddy Harkness Novel moves from dive bars to Harvard dorm rooms to the city’s elite social clubs, as Harkness puts everything at risk — his department, his nascent family, and his life — to try to derail a seemingly unstoppable conspiracy before it’s too late. Stretching from the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia to the Golden Gate of San Francisco, Patrick Hoffman‘s Every Man a Menace offers an unflinching account of the making,…

Garfield Ellis‘s The Angels’ Share is the story of a Jamaican father and his adult son who travel across the island together in a touching and humorous novel that explores family reconciliation. Kevin Keating’s The Captive Condition: A Novel is a chilling and deliciously dark tale about an idyllic Midwestern college town that turns out to be a panorama of depravity and a nexus of horror. Inspired by a reading of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island,…

Megan Abbott‘s novel, You Will Know Me, answers the question: Just how far will a parent go to achieve their child’s dream? Rivers Solomon’s novel An Unkindness of Ghosts, follows the journey of a girl on antiquated space vessel she is desperate to escape that is ferrying the last fragments of humanity to a mythical Promised Land. Ivy Pochoda‘s latest novel, Wonder Valley, is a visionary and masterful portrait of contemporary Los Angeles.…

C. Morgan Babst‘s debut novel, The Floating World, is a dazzling story of family, home, and grief, which takes readers into the heart of Hurricane Katrina. Laura Lee Smith‘s novel, The Ice House, follows the beleaguered MacKinnons as they weather the possible loss of the family business, a serious medical diagnosis, and the slings and arrows of familial discord.…

Bethany Ball‘s debut novel, What To Do About The Solomons, is a hilarious multigenerational family saga set in Israel, New York, and Los Angeles that explores the secrets and gossip-filled lives of a kibbutz community near Jerusalem. Laura Davis Hubers‘s novel, The Velveteen Daughter, reveals the true story of the author of one of the most beloved children’s books of all time and her daughter, a world-renowned child prodigy whose fame at one time greatly eclipses her mother’s.…

A young boy’s murder unleashes chaos in the life of a schoolteacher and a small New England town in Patricia A. Smith‘s novel A Year of Needy Girls. Rivers Solomon’s novel An Unkindness of Ghosts, follows the journey of a girl on antiquated space vessel she is desperate to escape, that is ferrying the last fragments of humanity to a mythical Promised Land.…

David Weisberg’s The American Plan is the inaugural volume of three-novel series chronicling the rise and fall of Sun Belt America, from the Korean War through the financial debacle of 2008. In Leni Bogat’s Murder in the House of the Muse, part of his Jeremy Wadlington-Smythe series, Jeremy, an accomplished orchestral conductor with a unique view of his mission, finds himself embroiled in in a murder mystery.…

Since 1990, South Florida Writers Association (SFWA) has provided a forum to encourage literary excellence among writers of all genres in the South Florida area. Don’t miss this showcase of local talent, all of whom are members of the SWFA. With Don Daniels, Rhyme and Punishment; Zorina Frey, Thecla: A Dark Romance; Steve Liebowitz, Devorah: Book One of the Covenant and Scrolls Trilogy; and Cara Nusinov; Unrequited Loves and Other French Kisses.…

A new twist on keto: The fat-burning power of ketogenic eating meets the clean green benefits of a plant-centric plate in Will Cole’s Ketotarian: The (Mostly) Plant-Based Plan to Burn Fat, Boost Your Energy, Crush Your Cravings, and Calm Inflammation. Celebrate the gorgeous and delicious possibilities of plant-based southern cuisine in Timothy Pakron’s Mississippi Vegan: Recipes and Stories from a Southern Boy’s Heart. Latin Comfort Foods Made Healthy offers exactly what the title suggests: comfort foods—the kinds of food Latinos were raised with and crave,…

Gabriell Birkner’s and Rebecca Soffer’s brutally honest and inspiring Modern Loss invites us to talk intimately and humorously about grief, helping us confront the humanity (and mortality) we all share.…

Dr. Laurie Nadel’s The Five Gifts: Discovering Hope, Healing and Strength When Disaster Strikes is like an emergency “Go-Kit” for the mind, packed with information and insight that can minimize and prevent long-term psycho-spiritual damage from a traumatic event.…

What If This Were Enough?: Essays by Heather Havrilesky is an impassioned collection tackling our obsession with self-improvement and urging readers to embrace the imperfections of the everyday. In Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness, designer and TED star Ingrid Fetell Lee explains how to cultivate a happier, healthier life by making small changes to your surroundings.…

Founder of the international movement, Daybreaker, Radha Agrawal presents Belong: Find Your People, Create Community, and Live a More Connected Life, a creative blueprint for bringing this most important dimension back into our lives. Born of moral indignation, informed by decades of study, and seasoned by a life of devoted self-cultivation, Monk Yun Rou’s Mad Monk Manifesto has the answers we’re looking for, organically cohering personal prescriptions and calls to social and political action in one powerful document.…

Virginia Sole-Smith’s The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America is an exploration, both personal and deeply reported, of how we learn to eat in today’s toxic food culture.…

Tal Keinan’s God Is in the Crowd: Twenty-First Century Judaism is a bold proposal for discovering relevance in Judaism and ensuring its survival, from a pioneering social activist, business leader, and fighter pilot in the Israeli Air Force.…

John Leland’s Happiness Is a Choice You Make: Lessons from a Year Among the Oldest Old is an extraordinary look at what it means to grow old and a heartening guide to well-being. The End of Old Age: Living a Longer, More Purposeful Life, Dr. Marc Agronin, the acclaimed author of How We Age, presents a hopeful and practical model of aging, as well as a guide to understanding how we can all make the journey better.…

James Mustich’s 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die moves across cultures and through time to present an eclectic collection of titles, each described with the special enthusiasm readers summon when recommending a book to a friend. The Joys of Travel: And Stories that Illuminate Them is a collection of Thomas Swick’s personal essays about what he has identified as “the seven joys of travel.” In Sailing to the Edge of Time, John Kretschmer shares his simple profundities that will inspire those who live to sail,…

In The Power of Presence: Be A Voice in Your Child’s Ear Even When You’re Not With Them, Joy Thomas Moore explores seven pillars of presence that all parents can use to positively influence their children. In conversation with Ana Veciana Suarez.…

In The Stigmatized Child: “Mommy, am I stupid?”: Helping Parents Overcome the Stigma Attached to Learning Disabilities, ADHD, and Lack of Social Skills, John-Richard Thompson explore the different forms of stigma, such as the stigma faced by children from classmates and friends and from society.…

Nina MacLaughlin’s Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung, the women of Ovid’s Metamorphoses claim their stories and challenge the power of myth. Jake Wolff’s first novel, The History of Living Forever, tells the story of a chemistry student who falls for his teacher and, at his death, uncovers a centuries-old quest for the elixir of life. Fernando A. Flores’s Tears of the Trufflepig is an absurdist take on life along the border in a parallel universe.…

Set within the charged insularity of rural West Virginia, Mesha Maren’s Sugar Run is a searing and gritty debut about making a break for another life. In Andrea Bartz’s The Lost Night, a woman looks into a decade old death of a friend, and questions whether she was involved. Inspired by a true story, Eileen Pollack’s The Professor of Immortality is a gripping, heartfelt look at the way we might choose to respond to recent advances in science and technology.…

In What Do We Need Men For?: A Modest Proposal, America’s longest running advice columnist, E. Jean Carroll goes on the road to speak to women about hideous men and whether we need them. In conversation with Lisa Birnbach, host of the podcast Five Things That Make Life Better with Lisa Birnbach.…

In History of My Breath, Kristin Kovacic attempts to trap the fugitive knowledge of the durable adventures – childhood, marriage, childbirth, parenting. In Motherland: A Memoir of Love, Loathing, and Longing, Elissa Altman learns to navigate the turbulent waters of the mother-daughter dynamic. Adrienne Brodeur’s memoir, Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me, is a daughter’s tale of living in the thrall of a magnetic, complicated mother.”…

In The Unrhymables, authors Julie Marie Wade and Denise Duhamel explore women’s lives and choices with a feminist perspective in thirteen innovative, thematically linked essays.…

Möbius Strips and Other Stories collects the best of Tom DeMarchi’s short and flash fiction across two decades. In his collection of short stories, Perp Walk, Jim Daniels maps out the emotional capitals and potholes of coming of age in a blue-collar town in Michigan.…

Join four Florida-rooted editors and writers for an industry talk about how to take any community-centered literary project – anthology, creative arts publication, food culture, and more – from start to finish. Featuring DUSTIN BROOKSHIRE, Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology co-editor; GRAZIE SOPHIA CHRISTIE and GINEVRA LILY DAVIS, The Miami Native co-editors; SUANAY HERNANDEZ, UndrBelly editor; and JASMINE RESPESS, Islandia Journal literary editor.…

In her 14th poetry collection, Homelight: Poems, LOLA HASKINS remembers poets who preceded her, from Sappho to Blake to Merwin, before turning to the arrogance of the way we treat the planet and each other, and finally considering death in the form of tributes to lost friends and her own preparations to follow them. In The Halo of Bees: New & Selected Poems 1990-2022, MICHAEL HETTICH presents selections from more than two dozen books spanning five decades,…

Fire Index: Poems by BETHANY BREITLAND measures the interior life of a survivor against the world she creates through her own fractured marriage, motherhood, and religion, reckoning with her complicit, and often dishonest life to demand her full attention, forgiveness, and responsibility. Drawing its title from the 1863 federal act that banished the Dakota people from their homelands, Removal Acts: Poems by ERIN MARIE LYNCH reckons with the present-day repercussions of historical violence, assembling an intimate record of recovery from bulimia and insisting that self-erasure cannot be separated from the erasures of genocide.…

A special event with OLIVER DE LA PAZ, The Diaspora Sonnets; ANNELYSE GELMAN, Vexations; JOSÉ OLIVAREZ, Promises of Gold; PAISLEY REKDAL, West: A Translation; CHARIF SHANAHAN, Trace Evidence: Poems; EVIE SHOCKLEY, suddenly we; and MONICA YOUN, From From: Poems; moderating is RUTH DICKEY, National Book Foundation executive director. Buy The Diaspora Sonnets. – De La Paz Buy Vexations.…

In Excuse Me As I Kiss The Sky, RUDY FRANCISCO explores poetic forms such as the contrapuntal, golden shovel, and the ode to inspire readers, expose them to different avenues of approaching the act of writing poetry, and invite them to try it for themselves. Moderated by South Florida Youth Poet Ambassador and Speak Up Student Ambassador CAITLIN VILLACRUSIS. Buy Excuse Me As I Kiss The Sky. – Francisco  …

MAHOGANY L. BROWNE’s Chrome Valley: Poems offers an intricate portrait of Black womanhood in America, capturing the pleasures and pangs of young love and motherhood, and reveling in the beauty of the undaunted self-determination passed down from Black woman to Black woman. The poems in CHEN CHEN’s Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency: Poems a acknowledge and name the persistent threat of violence, while also reminding its reader of joys both small and large: West Texas sunsets,…

In Two Open Doors in a Field, a profusion of sonnets rises from SOPHIE KLAHR’s bond with Nebraska and the experience of driving thousands of miles alone while listening to the radio, where unexpected landscapes make listening to the unexpected more acute. NICOLE TALLMAN’s Poems for the People and Fersace are both a refreshing and honest Michigan-meets-Miami handling of hard topics that adjust to the changing world around her, seeking solace in conversations with the dead and living (including herself),…

Join Connecticut Youth Poet Laureate and author of Bloodpaths SATURN BROWNE and Montgomery County Youth Poet Laureate EVAN WANG for a reading and conversation, moderated by South Florida Youth Poet Ambassador and Speak Up Student Ambassador CAITLIN VILLACRUSIS, on sharpening one’s craft within the teen poetry community, developing the individual voice in contest cycles, and succeeding publicly while failing privately. Speak Up, a free, year-round creative writing workshop series for teens ages 13-19, is a program of Miami Book Fair.…

Razzle Dazzle: New and Selected Poems 2002-2022 traces the evolution of MAJOR JACKSON’s transformative imagination and fierce music through five acclaimed volumes across two decades of writing. This collection offers a sustained portrait of a poet “bound up in the ecstatic,” whose buoyant lyricism confronts the social and political forces that would demean humanity. In August 2014, Michael Brown – a young, unarmed Black man – was shot to death by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. What followed was a period of protests and turmoil,…

RACHEL DEWOSKIN’s absolute animal finds sense amid disorder and unearths connections between the animal and the human, the ancient and the contemporary, inviting us to consider what holds life, what lasts, and what defines and enriches the experience of being human. In Romantic Comedy, JAMES ALLEN HALL creates liberatory narratives, whether grieving a father’s death, documenting the survival of sexual assault, interrogating the scripts of addiction, or revisiting a 1980s crime thriller. Formally and acoustically attuned,…

In Standing in the Forest of Being Alive, KATIE FARRIS questions and praises the body even as it deteriorates in a gut-wrenching battle with cancer, affirming sensuality despite physical scars. JANINE JOSEPH’s Decade of the Brain: Poems articulates the strangeness of living in relation to other past and simultaneous selves changed by injury, intimacy, notions of citizenship, and nation. BRIAN TURNER’s unique trilogy – The Wild Delight of Wild Things, The Goodbye World Poem,…